These kind of statement many fundamentalist have given over the centuries are, I would say, examples of Jeremiads. A Jeremiad was usually written in long text. Not just statements like today.  They were basically writings condemning modern society’s lack of morality and claiming current problems as Gods punishment.

In 1962, before renouncing his black supremacist views, Malcolm X was quoted at a Nation of Islam meeting saying a recent plane crash in Paris, where all the passengers were white. Was Allah’s way of bring justice for the killing of Ronald Stokes who was shoot to death by Los Angeles police officers.
-Jp
 

I have read and re-read this article and can’t see where the author mentioned voting, past presidents, or dispensing with religion altogether—only unfortunate people who use others’ misfortunes to further agendas of hatred and discrimination.

This problem goes beyond mere theology of these religious adherents, but the religion itself. There’s frankly no way to interpret the Bible as not advocating what you call “retribution theology.“ The stories and lessons are there, plain as day. Fortunately many people who claim to be of this faith that are rarely adherents of the actual religion, as opposed to using it as a label for their more generic faith in some higher power. Those who actually stick to the doctrine recognize that that such moderates aren’t true adherents, regardless of whether it gets them off the hook for much of the unpopular scripture in modern times.
 
Long story short: It’s not they’re getting the religion wrong and being atrocious and unacceptable in modern society… it’s that they’re actually adhering to a religion that is atrocious and unacceptable in modern society.
 
From an excellent post from another local blogger on the subject:

All the people condemning Roberton seem to be of the mindset that God couldn’t have been behind an even that has caused such suffering. Which makes me wonder: have these people even <span style=“font-style: italic;“>read</span> the Bible? God sent a plague upon Egypt that killed the first born male child of every family in Egypt—including the cattle—so that Moses could lead the Jews out of Egypt into the wilderness. The number of people killed in the Haitian earthquake is probably a drop in the bucket compared to the number that died when God drowned every living person on Earth except for Noah’s family. Turning to the New Testament, I’d like to point out that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, foretold in Revelation, are not named Kittens, Puppies, Flowers, and Candy. God is more than happy to slaughter people by the bucketload when it suits His mysterious ways.

The full post is worth the read if you get a chance.

“Long story short: It’s not they’re getting the religion wrong and being atrocious and unacceptable in modern society… it’s that they’re actually adhering to a religion that is atrocious and unacceptable in modern society.“

Exactly. Instead of trying to wrap the Bible around modern, enlightened thought (for lack of a better term), it makes a lot more sense to discard the Bible for the outdated document it actually is.  When extremists like Robertson say these kind of horrible things, their more liberal Christian critics say, “Well they just don’t get the true meaning of the scriptures.“  That’s not the case. The problem is, they often do. 

I’m simplfying here, because there’s plenty of beautiful, relevant and still useful stuff in the Bible.  However, sometimes when people like Robertson and Bin Laden do extreme things, it’s not always because they got their religion wrong.  It’s sometimes because they got it right. They’re just working off blueprints written during times when the dominant mentalities were a lot more violent and a lot less tolerant. 

The question to me isn’t so much whether Robertson is a good Christian, but whether it’s good to be a Christian in the first place.

But when you say “the religion itself” it makes Christianity sound like one unified religion with one body of believers who all hold to the same doctrine. But it’s not. Christianity is a very splintered, fragmented religion made up of diverse people who believe very different things. I don’t think there even exists anymore what C.S. Lewis calls “Mere Christianity”—a set of basic beliefs that all denominations and churches hold in common. So while I agree that there are some factions of Christianity whose beliefs are “atrocious and unacceptable in modern society,“ I don’t think it’s fair to paint all of Christianity with that brush.
And, yes, it is true that much of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) has themes of retribution theology. The Hebrew God YHWH is often a jealous and vengeful God who punishes people for not obeying the commandments. But this was the way ancient people tried to understand the world around them. When events happened, such as earthquakes, that they did not understand, they blamed it on the Gods and assumed that humans must have done something to offend the deities.
But religion evolves and grows up over time. With Jesus, we find a more “grown up” version of religion. Instead of “an eye for an eye” we get “do not repay evil with evil.“ The essence of Jesus’ teachings are love, compassion, forgiveness, patients and helping others. Not that those aren’t present in the Hebrew Bible as well—after all Jesus was a Jew and his basic message of love God and love your neighbor comes directly from the Hebrew scriptures. But with Jesus these ideas are more focused and defined and his understanding of God is that of a loving, caring, forgiving deity—not one who smites people at whim.
Religions grow and evolve just as people do, but, like any organism, there are mutations that develop during the course of evolution that do not work out so well, while there are others that do work. Then there are still others that don’t change at all. I think the process of religious evolution will, over time, weed out the versions of Christianity that aren’t beneficial to humanity. And the versions that don’t change will simply become extinct.
But does that mean we have to throw out completely the old stuff that doesn’t work? To some degree yes—we don’t continue to believe in magic or in God’s that cause natural disasters. But we also hold onto the ancient stuff to remember, to see where we’ve come from and to learn from our past mistakes.
Most of us do not behave the same way we we did when we were two years old, throwing temper tantrums and such. But we still keep the photos and videos and mementos from our past. I view religion much the same way. It has evolved and it is still evolving. The conservative fundamentalists—of all religions, not just Christianity—are the folks who do not allow their faith to grow up and change for the better. For them it is a fixed, unchanging, absolute set of doctrines and they reject anything and anyone that disagrees with them. It’s like they have kept the old photos of when they were two and say, “this is how I’m always going to behave.“
But I see a good religion as something that is constantly evolving and moving forward, making the world and its people better. There are versions of every religion that are doing this and there are also versions that are doing the opposite.
And of course, there are people who are not religious at all, yet they are loving, compassionate and eager to help others who are less fortunate. We religious folks shouldn’t try to “convert” these folks because they’re already doing what they ought to be doing. There are plenty of non-Christians who follow the teachings of Jesus. Maybe they should be “converting” some of us Christians who aren’t following Jesus.

That still leaves some major irreconcilable problems in my opinion. First you’re still basically advocating that Christians cherry pick which divinely inspired words of God they listen to, which when you get right down to it is abandoning Christianity for something that isn’t so blatantly repugant.
 
Second, the divine Jesus, son of, one with, is God. The same genocidal baby killing monster who is the main antagonist in the “retribution theology” you despise, is the guy you’re now trying to depict as nothing more than a peace loving hippy who’d sooner hug you than have something contrary to say about you.
 
If Christians want a new religion, I’m all for it. The Abrahamic God is so foul that I have to restrain myself from flinging fouler language in His general direction.
 
If Christians want Christ to be detached from the “O.T.“ then they should have thought of that when they were making up their mythology in the first place and avoided the centuries of endless absurdities in trying to explain why it wasn’t really just some new cult. Just ask the Mormons. But detaching God 2.0 from God 1.0 just isn’t that simple, or God 3.0 if you’re a Mormon, and God: The Remake Director’s Cut “as it was meant to be,“ if you’re a Muslim.
 
In the end the religion, no matter how many interpretations, factions, etc there may be out there, is still fundamentally based on the Bible. And the Bible in spite of many worthwhile attributes and unquestionable historical significance making it relevant for study and discussion for perhaps the rest of history… is still so fundamentally flawed to apply as guidebook to modern morality and understanding of life, the universe, and everything… that those who actually do adhere to it strictly are castigated by believers and non-believers alike.
 
Yes, many self-described Christians adhere to faith and beliefs detached partly or wholly from the tenants of the religion. Which is probably some of the greatest proof that it should be relegated to the mythology section once and for all, studied for it’s impact on the world, it’s philosophical tenents studied with critical thinking… but never again with blind faith. Christians have generally already done this beyond the small pockets of literalists clinging to it for whatever reason. They’ve given their generic, often nearly agnostic religious views cover by still calling it Christianity, but openly admitting they don’t agree with what they’re embarrassed to admit is God’s word.
 
And while I appreciate that so-called moderates of the various Abrahamic religions are far less likely to gun me down over my opinion, or fly jet liners into sky scrapers, or attempt to use the state to force my adherence to their bronze age morality set… it doesn’t make them true Christians. Just closet apostates.

Mr Neaville, apparently in your theology, bad theology is simply theology that doesn’t suit you.  If you were spending more time in your Bible, you would not be so daring in your words.

But what, exactly, is a “true Christian”? And who gets to define that term when Christianity is so fragmented and the definition of “true Christian” is claimed by numerous and opposing factions?
I think “true Christian” is nothing but a straw man.

It’d be a straw man if I was depicting your argument as something it isn’t to claim an easy debate point. There is a fallacy along the lines of “no true scotsman” that could apply if I were defending Christianity from negative examples. But in this case I’m not denying that there can be varying interpretations, but once you start chopping out and/or ignoring what is supposed to be the divine word of God telling you how this whole mess works… simply because God’s word doesn’t mesh with reality anymore… well, then you’re going beyond mere interpretation and essentially giving up on the religion and forming your own new one from the bits and pieces.
 
My argument is that if you start going down that path, you’ve already become an apostate, regardless of whether one admits that fact. The fact that such closet apostates are the norm, doesn’t negate the fact that when you’re actively ignoring what you believe to be the divinely inspired word of God, you’ve already given up on the Biblical version of God being valid.

Wow.  That’s some smart stuff from Glock21.  Just what I would say if I could write that well on the subject.

Glock, I do see your point. In fact, I can see alot of what you said in your last post being applied to early Christianity as it began to emerge from Judaism.
The first followers of Jesus were Jews. They didn’t call themselves Christians—they didn’t even know of such a word. In fact, the whole christology/mythology surrounding Jesus’ birth/life/death didn’t materialize for decades and didn’t fully crystalize for hundreds of years after Jesus’ death. Jesus’ first followers were simply Jews who followed the teachings of a brilliant rabbi.
So I hear your exact words being said to these Jesus-following Jews: “once you start chopping out…the divine word of God…simply because God’s word doesn’t mesh with reality anymore…you’re going beyond mere interpretation and essentially giving up on the religion and forming your own new one from the bits and pieces.“
But the first followers of Jesus certainly didn’t intend to start an entirely new religion. They saw themselves as Jews or at least as some part of a larger Jewish community. And at that point Judaism was in much the same state that Christianity is today—it was a dispersed body of people who believed lots of different things and argued about it constantly. They didn’t even have the benefit we have today of having a fixed canon. The Jewish Bible didn’t become fixed until _after_ the Christian Bible did, and, in large part, as a response to the Christian Bible.
The first followers of Jesus saw in his teachings what Judaism was “supposed” to look like. It wasn’t until later when interlopers, like Paul, arrived on the scene that it started turning into a completely different religion with its own mythologies.
So, you can call me an apostate because I’ve abandoned some of the biblical ideas to which other Christians cling. But I’m going to continue to call myself a Christian. At least until some new interlopers arrive with new mythologies and tell me I’m now a member of their new religion. But right now, Christianity’s the only one I got.

Fair enough. I’m blunt about my views regarding the whole thing, but I must admit to having been unaware of what religious views, if any, you had until looking at some other parts of the blog after my rants. I could see how it could come off as directed specifically at you personally, as opposed to my general feelings on the matter (not to mention poor choice of pronouns in hindsight). Probably should have dug a bit deeper before being my usual self so I could “consider the audience” like my instructors used to say.
 
Your arguments on the matter are frankly a bit baffling to me, though I’ve enjoyed reading what I’ve seen so far, regardless of any disagreements. I’m a fan of co-existing and arguing too, so an echo chamber wouldn’t really be all that fun. I’ve chucked the feed into my RSS reader for whatever arguments the future might hold.
 
As to why I’m still baffled though… you seem to have a pretty solid grip on the history behind all of this stuff, which for me generally highlights how non-divine the actual religion itself is given all of the typical flawed humanity behind how it became what it is today. That doesn’t negate the underlying faith in higher powers per se, but it certainly makes me question the institutions of men who, imo, exploit that part of the human condition whether with good intentions or deliberately paving the road to hell. With conservatives the adherence even if they are well versed on the history makes a bit more sense due to the philosophy of putting tradition before skepticism or outright making doubt a sin in and of itself.
 
With a critical thinker at the helm of that knowledge, from my arguably arrogant point of view, I wonder why you don’t take the exit to the highway’s open road instead of staying on this unpaved gravel road that goes nowhere. I have a sense of ‘missing something’ and not quite getting it.
 
I suppose I should just keep reading and it might make more sense to me over time, not to mention give my curiosity a rest and stop being so… well, me, about the topic. I think I see your point about your own perspective (no one true Christianity), but it almost seems like the perfect starting point for a Jeffersonian approach. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but you seem to be making the argument that your Christianity is one that seeks to sever the ties between Jesus and the Abrahamic God that Christianity, by definition and without exception as far as I know, requires as the basis of his divinity and thus the point of worshipping him. The institutions may be irrelevant, but without that connection that they are one and the same, it seems to cease being Christianity as much as Jesus-style Confucianism of sorts.
 
Anyhoo… that’s where my heads at reading what I’ve read thus far. Again, I hope that my blunt and ornery ways aren’t confused for malice of any kind. I’m ranty but that’s just because I enjoy a good argument on topics I’m interested in. In the zone, and all that.

A very enjoyable and enlightening exchange, made even more so by its civility, a scarce thing on the internet.  Glock has raised a very interesting point, which brought to mind some historical stuff I was dabbling in while recently being in the vicinity of Occitania (you can google it) and visiting 11th to 13th century frescos (the propaganda of the day).
Glock’s comment is this:  “you seem to be making the argument that your Christianity is one that seeks to sever the ties between Jesus and the Abrahamic God that Christianity, by definition and without exception as far as I know, requires as the basis of his divinity and thus the point of worshipping him.“
There once was a large group of Christians—they considered themselves such—who are an exception to the ties Glock notes. What happened to them is instructive. Sometimes called, by the Roman Church, the great heresy, the movement was Catharism, which was exceptionally strong in southern France, or the Langue-d’oc region.  It was in large measure violently wiped out in the Albigensian Crusades. 
The details of its rise and spread, and of its belief systems can be googled, but the gist of it is that it was a mix of early Christianity (they claimed they were the true Christians with a lineage back to the early church) and Manichaeist or dualist theology (there’s a good god and a bad god) that spread from the east, probably a kind of Zoastrianism, via Bulgaria (aside: the link between Bulgar and the word bugger for sodomy passes through the Cathar’s practices, or more likely through the Roman Church’s propaganda about the Cathars).  The good god is that of the new testament and the immaterial world, that higher spiritual plane where Jesus resided.  The bad god was the god of the old testament who created the material world.  The idea is to transcend to the former.  So, the old testament here is worse than worthless, and there are horrified reports of Cathars throwing the OT down the wells. (Little is know that comes directly from the Cathars, it has to be inferred mostly from existing Roman Church documents).
So to make a long story somewhat shorter, the pope is concerned about this growing challenge to trinitarian orthodoxy, and a guy named Dominic (yes, that Dominic) takes on the task of debating the Cathars, sure that they will crumple before the unassailable truth of Roman Church doctrine.  Quite the opposite happens and the Cathars mock the future Dominicans, and some Catholics switch sides.  Time for plan B.  The pope assembles an army of northern French nobility with a promise of southern French lands taken from southern French nobility who tolerated the Cathars.  Mayhem ensues and as many as a million people, almost all civilians, are killed, the French state (such as it was) is extended, and the structure is set up for the first big Inquistion, after which Catharism is pretty much wiped out, although it probably lingered for centuries, and some think traces exist to this day in the region. 
A most notable quote from the event is from the Abbot of Citeax (from which the Cistercian Order emerges) who is the leading the Crusade for the pope.  In the town of Beziers, the locals are generally being slaughtered and they take refuge is a church.  The army is going in, but someone asks the Abbot how they will be able to tell the Catholics from the Cathars.  The answer is “Kill them all, God will know his own.“  So they are all massacred. (I say Metallica owes the Cistercians royalties).
One commentator says this about the outcome: “the Roman Church had proof that a sustained campaign of genocide can work. It also had the precedent of an internal Crusade within Christendom, and the machinery of the first modern police state that could be wheeled out for the Spanish Inquisition, and again for later Inquisitions and genocides.“  Others have said it was a successful trial run for fascism (which is a bit of stretch, but then again…..)  One thing it certainly did was strengthen the heirarchical authority of the Roman Church and their melding with political authority, not to be undone until the French Revolution. 
Yes, you will be expected to know this on the test.
 
 

It’s all good, Glock. I take no offense at anything you’ve written. To the contrary, it has been very enjoyable for me to respond to you because I rarely get to be an apologist for my faith. I’m usually too busy, in this column anyway, pointing out the backwards parts of religion that I seldom point out the forward parts. So I thank you for giving me that opportunity.
 
I guess the reason that I don’t “take the exit to the highway’s open road” is because I don’t believe that this “unpaved gravel road” goes nowhere. I believe it is going somewhere.
 
I see humanity as moving towards something. I believe we are progressing, evolving towards something better than we are now—towards a time when we are, as a whole, more enlightened, intelligent, tolerant, loving and compassionate than we are now and have been in the past. It might seem, in many ways that we are not progressing towards this—certainly our world still has its share of greed, corruption, hatred and violence. But I believe, or like to believe anyway that, in general, it is less so than in the past. And, perhaps more important than my belief in this, is my hope that this is the case.
 
I see one of the purposes of religion as helping us get to this evolutionary goal by giving us an understanding, however limited it might be at any particular time and place, of our place in the cosmos and how we ought to relate to one another.
 
Most religions have a word or phrase for this evolutionary goal. Christians call it the “Kingdom of God.“ Others might call it “heaven” or “paradise” or “shambala” or “nirvana.“ But most of these concepts were limited by the ancient worldviews and cosmologies in which the minds that conjectured them existed. But that doesn’t diminish its potential for reality.
 
The way Jesus phrased it resonates with me: “The Kingdom of God is within us.“ It is a state of being for which we have the potential, but have not yet realized.
 
Christianity has, unfortunately, turned it either into a mythological place that we will get to only after we die, or one that will “come down from heaven” at some point in the future. I think of it as something more real and practical than that. Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the “Omega Point” is a very interesting evolutionary take on this. I suggest his book, “The Phenomenon of Man,“ if you’ve never read it.
 
I know I probably sound a bit more like a pantheist than a Christian, but there are resons why I do not totally abandon the notion of calling myself a Christian. I was brought up in and shaped by the culture and doctrines of Christianity and, although I have some knowledge of other religions, I do not have near the level of mastery of other religion’s concepts that I have with Christianity; so it is just easier for me to talk about Christianity and use the concepts that most Christians are familiar with. I might mean something different by “the kingdom of God” than the average Chistian means, but we still have a common vocabulary with which to communicate. Plus, if we can get past our understandings of the inner working of religion, I think, on the whole, we are trying to get us to the same place.
 
Religions are like cars. The Muslims are riding in theirs, the Christians in theirs, the Jews in theirs and so on. And all the different factions and denominations are in their own cars. We’re all headed in the same general direction. But some of the passengers in the cars think that there are hamsters running around in a wheel under the hood and that that is what is making the car go. Others have some kind of general idea that there is actually an engine in the car that is making it run. Nobody really seems actually to be a mechanic who knows everything about the engine. But we’re all still riding in the cars and trying to get to the same place. Some of the cars are driven by wreckless drivers suffering from religious road rage and they crash into the other cars. And sometimes the cars just break down. When we have to open up the hood and figure out what’s actually wrong, the hamster believers aren’t going to be much help.

Thanks for sharing the history, Stuart. Good stuff. Another excellent read that deals with the relationship between Jesus and the Abrahamic God is “Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine” by Harold Bloom. One of my favorite books.

Mr. Tarr… a fascinating exception. However I suddenly feel even less original in suggesting a necessary and incompatible dualism with Christian faith. I suppose in my ignorance I was doomed to repeat it!
 
heretic… this car analogy is seemingly more useful than I had anticipated. I think I can appreciate the notion of religion, like the kind of car one drives, having a lot to do with ones environment growing up and living in, coming from a Ford or Chevy family… or a driving a Renault in other countries, for example. Seems to be a fairly sociological approach as opposed to anything relating to the veracity of the beliefs. It’s probably not controversial to suggest that if a twist of fate had you growing up and living in a moderate Muslim country that you might be defending your self-identification as a moderate Muslim based on whether the Medina warring periods should be taken as literally as the fundamentalists do.
 
It also seems to be that you regard the various religions and factions within to have varying roadmaps to get to the same place on the map, with various names for that spot. Where some fundamentalists view the other roadmaps of having bridges where none exist and lakes of fire blocking the path, you seem to think they all have at least the basic information to reach the destination.
 
Now from might point of view, there are no roadmaps, just vague instructions on how to drive and operate the car… and a divining rod instead of a GPS that the saleman swears will take you someplace awesome if you do it right. Meanwhile there are other folks driving around with actual GPS to reach very real destinations, say Atlanta and researching biology, or New York to study astronomy, or Houston to calculate out some theoretical physics. And on the overpasses sometimes we can see people driving aimlessly on these little dirt roads trying to find answers to ambiguous and poorly defined questions.
 
“What’s my purpose?“ I don’t know. What do you want it to be? “What’s the meaning of life?“ I don’t know. What do you want to make of it? “Is there life after death?“ Sounds like an absurd contradiction to me, but literally, sure… for the rest of us. For the less ambiguous questions the answers tend to be making stuff up that later gets shown wrong. No Apollo dragging the sun around, no souls needed to show why the chemistry of gametes work, and no giant diety treating the world like a playdough factory to explain geological formations anymore.
 
Which brings me back to the idea of ignoring the road signs to the interstate and the open road. I certainly like the souped up motorcycle you’ve made out of the parts of your Christianity car… but what are you really looking for driving it around on the weekends with all those old clunkers on county road 5?

I’m sorry to hear of your terrible experience in that school, Cam. Religious schools are, unfortunately, often places where children’s minds are poisoned with bad theology. Rogers and Hammerstein said it well in a song from South Pacific:
 
You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear
You’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught
 
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade
You’ve got to be carefully taught